Magazine

Google Cloud Manager Speaks to Young AFCEANs

In April, the chapter's Young AFCEANs hosted a Business Over Breakfast featuring Tom Wojszynski, senior manager, Google Cloud, at the Hilton Garden Inn in Montgomery, Alabama. Wojszynski spoke to a combined civilian and military audience about Google's Cloud Platform technologies and Google's challenges with addressing cloud requirements for the Defense Department. He discussed the evolution of Google's infrastructure technologies into its current Cloud Platform offerings. One of the key features of Google's Cloud Platform infrastructure is that automatic failover and data replication are designed into the system from the beginning, ensuring that hardware failures can be addressed without the loss of functionality for Google's customers. Wojszynski also mentioned Google's massive recurring investments in its own infrastructure, including $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014. These capabilities are used by major customers such as Snapchat and Netflix, which have significant bandwidth and reliability needs on Google's Cloud Platform. They also power Google's own search engine, YouTube and Gmail. This is the same infrastructure that Google is now making available to government customers as their Cloud Platform offerings, such as cloud storage, BigQuery for data analytics and Google's App Engine for Platform as a Service (PaaS). Wojszynski addressed specific challenges that Google is facing in the Defense Department cloud arena, such as public law restrictions on how the department must deal with data access, coordination with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the FEDRamp certification challenges relating to Google's approach to building and maintaining cloud platforms. Following the presentation, Wojszynski conducted a brief question-and-answer session, and audience members networked.